up your personality. By the principle of Hebbian learning, you will unhook
the circuits connected to the old self during your daily life. At the same
time, you are no longer epigenetically signaling the same genes in the same
ways. This is another step so that you will become more conscious. It is
developing “conscious control” of yourself.
When you can stop a knee-jerk emotional reaction to some thing or
person in your life, you are choosing to save yourself from returning to the
old you that thinks and acts in such limited ways. By the same idea, as you
gain conscious control over your thoughts that may be initiated from some
stray memory or association connected with some environmental cue, you
will move away from the predictable destiny in which you think the same
thoughts and perform the same actions, which will create the same reality. It
is a reminder placed by you in your own mind.
As you become aware, redirect your familiar thoughts and feelings, and
recognize your unconscious states of being, you are also no longer using up
your valuable energy. When you are living in a state of survival, you are
signaling your body into emergency status by knocking it out of
homeostasis and thus mobilizing a lot of energy. Those emotions and
thoughts represent a low frequency of energy that is consumed by the body.
So when you are conscious and change them before they make it to the
body, then every time you notice or redirect them, you are conserving vital
energy you may use for creating a new life.
Associative Memories Trigger Automatic Responses
Since staying conscious is crucial to creating that new life, it is important
to understand how associative memories have made it so difficult for you to
stay conscious in the past, and how practicing redirection can help free you
from your old self.
Earlier in this book, we saw that Pavlov’s classical-conditioning
experiment with dogs beautifully illustrates why it can be so hard for us to
change. The dogs’ reaction in that experiment—learning to salivate in
response to a bell—is an example of a conditioned response based on an
associative memory.